Janus is a modular, massively parallel, and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system. Each Janus module has one computational core and one host. Janus is tailored to, but not limited to, the needs of a class of hard scientific applications characterized by regular code structure, unconventional data-manipulation requirements, and a few Megabits database. The authors discuss this configurable system's architecture and focus on its use for Monte Carlo simulations of statistical mechanics, as Janus performs impressively on this class of application.